Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

A little while after, you stood fanning your face with a menu. I was sweating in my suit. I couldn’t tell the Roseland’s painted flowers from its real ones. You put down the menu and massaged your right arm near the elbow. There was a shadow behind your eyes.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Nothing,” you said. You shook your arm out and summoned a crooked grin. The grin was unpersuasive at first but then abruptly you seemed to believe it. The grin said: Now what? I looked around. The other dancers didn’t seem real. They were paper dolls. I looked at my hands and then I looked at you.

We took a taxi to La Conga. We bought half pineapples full of juice and tipped gracious strangers’ rum inside. I sipped through the straw and gazed out into the room, where the men’s cufflinks were flashing in the lights. There was a woman on the little stage, backed by horns, gyrating to the flexing sax chords. She wore apples, pears and a banana on her head. My first pineapple had been at the Petrograd Agricultural Fair in 1921. My first banana had been in London, three years earlier, divided in two and served as a split . You had the hiccups. A man with a brush moustache was playing a pair of tall drums with the flats of his hands, sending the rhythm jumping into our shoulders and heels. We danced so hard my shoes came untied. It was not elegant, not deft, not courtly. We danced so hard my shoes came untied. I wondered if this was what it was like in Cuba. I decided that one day we should go; the two of us.

THAT SUMMER, WE MADE IT a habit. Once or twice a week I picked you up or you buzzed my door and off we’d whiz, in a taxicab or sometimes a subway car, through the rain or sunset. Perhaps I’d be tired after a long day of work, or you’d be bored, arm hurting from your hours of practice; but the moment we were side by side, looking at each other’s dancing shoes, these reluctances would scatter. “To the Onyx!” we told the cabbie. “To the El Morocco!” “To the Nouveau Palais!”

We danced everywhere. We danced to Benny Goodman’s band at the Philadelphia. We danced to Emile Coleman’s lot at the Green Room. We danced at the Winter Garden, with its horses and clowns and circus stripes. At the Sugar Cane there were plank floorboards, hot barbecue; at the Strand roof, illicit champagne and ginger ale by the bottle. Men’s jackets bulged with flasks, ladies’ gin nestled against chair legs. At the Country Club we played ping-pong, we danced the Blackbottom with Belle Livingstone, luxuriant in red pyjamas, right beside us. We went to Harlem: to the Savoy, on Lenox Avenue; to the Cotton Club, where there were usherettes in pink hunting coats, and a band with a blind piano player, and coloured girls, dancing as if they had been listening to those songs all their lives. At Small’s Paradise, where Charleston-ing waiters served Chinese food, the music was better than anywhere else. Negroes danced with whites as if the Revolution had come to America. We threw our partners, and caught them, and we darted and dipped and breathed hard. I felt richer than I ever had.

Sometimes we’d sit knee to knee and yell into each other’s ears, through the hullabaloo. I remember your earrings dancing on your ears. I remember you told me you wanted to travel.

“Where will you go?” I said.

“I don’t know,” you shouted. “Anywhere, everywhere. Paris, Casablanca, Siam. Why not? I could hop on a tug to Bermuda, ride an elephant in India. I’m done school. I don’t have any obligations, not really. Play some recitals, some premieres. Make some money and book a ticket to Calcutta.”

“Beethoven on the Ganges,” I murmured.

You leaned closer. “ What ?”

“Beethoven on the Ganges!” I yelled.

You grinned. The room was filled with happy tumult. “Or Stravinsky, or Dvořák. Wouldn’t that make a scene?” You grabbed for your glass of cold something. “Where would you go, if you could travel?”

“Me?”

“You.”

I laughed. “I came here, Clara. I’d come right here.”

You clicked your tongue. “Leon, you look like you need an elephant.”

Then we danced some more, circling and bumping on the floor, and there were moments in the songs when your face was merry, and moments when your face was serious, or far away.

I thought to myself:

There are twelve notes on the chromatic scale. But music is limitless .

FOR ALL OUR REVELS, there was one dance hall that we did not visit: Texas Guinan’s 30 °Club. We heard about it together, jammed into a cab with some friends of Schillinger’s. They were stinking drunk. “How about Guinan’s new place?” they said.

“Who?” I asked.

The man hiccupped. “So much for that!”

“What do you mean?” you said.

“Texas Guinan’s 30 °Club,” mumbled the woman, “is the most extraordinary and exclusive spot in all the boroughs of New York.”

“But you need an invitation to get in!” said her partner. “We figured mister Russian rocket scientist’d have one.”

“No,” I admitted.

The woman twisted in her seat. She dipped woozily, almost intimately, toward our faces. “It’s got the best music, the best dancers, the best — everything. Live parrots.” She burped. “Magnolias for sale, these Spanish guitarists who roam around. If you fall asleep the waiters blow trumpets in your ears!”

“Sounds like a good time, huh? It’s the promised land,” said the man. “Except the location is a secret .”

In the darkness of the cab you caught my eye, or I caught yours, and I decided: I will find out where it is, and I will win an invitation from Texas Guinan, and then one day, Clara Reisenberg, when we have something to celebrate, I will take you to the 30 °Club .

I would save this pleasure; I would keep the treasure buried. We would have celebrations yet.

BY NIGHT IT WAS the foxtrot and the shimmy. By day it was deal-making. A dozen deals a week, signed with handshake and signature, with raised glass and copies in triplicate. There were rich deals and poor deals. Simple, speculative, ambitious, aggressive, convoluted and crazy deals. Some of them were big-deal deals. Some were not. We signed my soul away and then signed it right back, richer. Let RCA take the theremin: let them raise up billboards in Boston, Chicago, Detroit. “We are forming a new corporation,” Pash would announce, flourishing paper, spraying ink, cracking champagne over the bow of a new entity: the Theremin Corporation, the Migos Corporation, the Theremin Patents Corporation. Corporations American, Panamanian, Canadian, real and false, shell companies and whatever hides in shells. The details were Pash’s, the inventions mine. Every time I saw my handler, his silhouette seemed wider, taller, darker, as if it had been gone over in charcoal. I remember how he appeared at my door one night, when I was on my way out to see you.

“Where are you going?”

“Out,” I said, cheerfully.

“Out where?”

I narrowed my eyes at him, a little mockingly. “On the town.”

He didn’t seem frightening, just formidable — an officer at peak efficiency. He wore a watch the colour of a Morgan dollar and a ring the colour of a Chervonet. His eyes had the glint of safety deposit boxes.

“A girl?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, and he nodded, without the slightest leer. I finished doing my tie. “Do you need me for something?”

He didn’t answer. I took down my coat, put on my hat. “Pash?”